Modern presidents don't retire -- instead, they embark on their
post-presidency. Society demands that they take up some cause greater
than themselves, as Jimmy Carter has done by building houses for
Habitat for Humanity and Bill Clinton by working to stop the global
spread of AIDS. The idea is to devote their time and celebrity to a
worthier purpose than simply buffing their image for the history books,
but a post-presidency properly pursued has exactly that effect. No
president's legacy is more tarnished than that of George W. Bush, and
in a few weeks he'll formally launch a campaign for rehabilitation by
publishing his memoirs. Bush hasn't yet settled on a big issue. He
should choose clean energy. Not only would it boost him significantly,
it would also benefit the American economy and the planet.

To get the most from a post-presidency, the former chief must
champion an issue of unassailable merit, though not one that appears
crassly self-serving, desperate, or hopeless. The ideal issue is one
whose outcome is still uncertain but that stands a good chance of
prevailing someday, so that the ex-president would be credited for
having made a decisive difference. The more difficult the fight, the
better.

That's why clean energy is a wonderful fit for Bush. Right now, the
issue is dead in Washington. But it won't be forever. And while this
may come as a shock to some people, Bush can legitimately lay claim to
a legacy that could serve as the basis for something larger. That
legacy, buried beneath so many other things, has been all but forgotten.

On a personal level, Bush long ago embraced green living in his own
home. His Crawford ranch, the "Western White House,'' is a marvel of
clean technology that is built from discarded limestone, features
geothermal heating and cooling, and uses purified wastewater to
irrigate the garden.

As governor, he had a big impact on Texas. In 1999, Bush signed into
law what has come to be regarded as a model renewable-energy standard --
the requirement that a certain proportion of the state's electricity
come from clean energy, which often spurs innovation. This law helped
Texas to become a leader in clean technology, especially wind power,
and it surpassed the statutory requirements years ahead of schedule.
Today, Texas generates more wind power than Denmark, and most states
have adopted renewable-energy standards of their own. As president,
Bush's administration promoted the objective of obtaining 20 percent of
the nation's energy from wind power by 2030.

True enough, Bush did not do much to realize that vision during his
time in the White House. He consistently opposed limiting carbon
emissions, which most environmentalists and energy entrepreneurs
believe necessary for clean technology to really take off. But a
post-presidency is not meant to follow in a direct line from one's
actions in the White House; freed from the strictures of electoral
politics, its very purpose is to transcend them. Bush himself appears
to understand this and is flirting with the idea: in a rare public
appearance in May, he delivered the keynote address to the American
Wind Energy Association's annual convention, invoking his Texas record.

Why should environmentalists want to embrace a president so
thoroughly associated with oil (and worse)? The short answer is:
because they need him. Last summer, the House of Representatives
narrowly passed a climate bill, but it went no further. The fact that
it died when President Obama was still popular and Democrats controlled
the Senate by a decisive margin was a clear indicator that it will take
more than just a partisan majority to bring about real change. It also
showed that environmental concerns alone will not compel Congress to
act. The challenge now is to broaden support.

The best bet to generate meaningful Republican interest is to press
the business case for clean technology. A number of major companies,
including Shell, Ford Motors, and Duke Energy, supported the House bill establishing carbon limits, but not enough of them to swing the debate.

Any venture capitalist will attest that clean energy is an idea
whose time is coming -- the economic reasons for it are simply too
powerful to ignore. The question is whether that technology, and the
jobs that come with it, will arise in the United States or in China or
India. Bush's brand of business-venerating Texas entrepreneurialism,
and its impressive results, makes for a compelling pitch. He could make
a real difference.

The economic case for clean technology is so strong that Bush could,
if he wanted, simply ignore the environmental aspects that many
conservatives find objectionable or overblown, and focus strictly on
the business opportunities and concerns about American competitiveness.
Conservatives would be more receptive if they weren't made to feel as
though they were capitulating to a liberal cause. The result would be
no less beneficial to all parties.

This evangelism would be no easy thing. The recent setbacks in
Congress have thoroughly politicized the issue of clean energy. Bush
would undoubtedly draw criticism and scorn from some quarters. But he
could make his commitment confident that the issue will only grow over
time, and with it his own stature. The point is not to grasp for an
easy public-relations hit, but to gain a place in the vanguard of an
important cause that will unfold across the long arc of a
post-presidency.

One day, years from now, the world will have embraced clean
technology, and we'll all look back at the poisonous struggles of today
and shake our heads. What was all the fuss about? If he is shrewd, and
manages to execute his post-presidency more deftly than he did his
actual presidency, the world may also look back and wonder the same
thing about George W. Bush.

About the Author

Most Popular

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

Members of Colombia's younger generation say they “will not torture for tradition.”

MEDELLÍN, Colombia—On a scorching Saturday in February, hundreds of young men and women in Medellín stripped down to their swimsuit bottoms, slathered themselves in black and red paint, and sprawled out on the hot cement in Los Deseos Park in the north of the city. From my vantage point on the roof of a nearby building, the crowd of seminude protesters formed the shape of a bleeding bull—a vivid statement against the centuries-old culture of bullfighting in Colombia.

It wasn’t long ago that Colombia was among the world’s most important countries for bullfighting, due to the quality of its bulls and its large number of matadors. In his 1989 book Colombia: Tierra de Toros (“Colombia: Land of Bulls”), Alberto Lopera chronicled the maturation of the sport that Spanish conquistadors had introduced to South America in the 16th century, from its days as an unorganized brouhaha of bulls and booze in colonial plazas to a more traditional Spanish-style spectacle whose fans filled bullfighting rings across the country.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.